


A Lie

by Sroloc_Elbisivni



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Siblings, Angst, Assumed Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Post-Canon, RvB Angst War, ambiguous ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 08:02:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6603163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sroloc_Elbisivni/pseuds/Sroloc_Elbisivni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two truths and a lie, not necessarily in that order:</p><p>-Wash doesn’t wear his armor to the funeral</p><p>-Franklin Donut never made it off the Staff of Charon</p><p>-Agent Washington has yet to meet Donut’s family</p><p>Donut Siblings verse</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Lie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hinn_Raven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinn_Raven/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Tales From the Multiverse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6559513) by [Hinn_Raven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinn_Raven/pseuds/Hinn_Raven). 



> Steph gave me permission to play around in her Donut siblings verse for the Tumblr Angst War, and specifically requested brainwashing, so this is at least 50% her fault. 
> 
> To summarize: Donut is Wash's brother, but Wash didn't know that until sometime on Chorus. In this world, he didn't find out until the funeral that happened because they thought Donut didn't survive.  
> Hah. Hah. Hah.

Two truths and a lie, not necessarily in that order:

-Wash doesn’t wear his armor to the funeral

-Franklin Donut never made it off the Staff of Charon

-Agent Washington has yet to meet Donut’s family

* * *

Wash doesn’t wear his armor to the funeral. 

It’s hell on his nerves, or would be, but he’s feeling too drained to actually…care. 

Charon’s gone, chased off the planet. Hargrove got away, but there’s enough bureaucracy after his head he won’t show his face on Chorus ever again. 

Wash knows that when the UNSC finds him, he’ll most likely get a slap on the wrist, house arrest at the most, but the war’s over and the Reds and Blues only lost two men. Epsilon’s gone, leaving only fragments behind.  

And Donut never made it off the Staff. 

He had been there one second, and then gone the next as a whole chunk of floor had collapsed. The comms had gone dead, and the Reds’ determination to find him had been rapidly derailed by the rest of the ship collapsing around them. 

Wash had hauled them out to the Pelican and nearly been brained by a beam falling on his head as he went back to look for Donut himself. Only Tucker trailing after him “to keep you from pulling any stupid shit” had gotten him off the ship. 

Only two casualties on a team is, theoretically, an incredible number. 

Two casulties on  _his_  team feels like the most grievous personal failure he could commit, carving out a chunk of his heart. 

So now they’re holding a funeral, and Wash isn’t wearing his uniform. 

He has, in fact, managed to scrounge up a suit, with a pink tie, even, courtesy of Sarge. 

Wash really doesn’t want to know where Sarge found enough pink ties for every member of the Reds and Blues, but he did. Wash can respect the sentiment, but he almost wishes the man hadn’t, because the pink flashes out of the corners of his eyes keep making him flinch. 

Agent Washington has yet to meet Donut’s family, who came to Chorus for the funeral, at Kimball’s invitation. There are supposed to be three sisters, in addition to Donut’s aging parents. Sarge is speaking with them now, before the service starts, and Wash has settled himself firmly at the edge of the second row. 

He’s promised himself that he’ll go find them after the service, at the reception, and speak to them himself. It’s the least he can do.

The service is a blur of meaningless ritual and ceremony and pomp, because the army does things its own way and never really knew Franklin Delano Donut, but they got one thing right, and that was that he was a hero, and so Wash might forgive them for that. 

He got dead stinking drunk for the first time in years last night, with all the Reds and Blues, and they told stories and yelled at the world and cried. Just a bit. 

And that, to him, was the funeral. This is a show. 

But it’s a show he’s going to sit and be quiet for and do his best not to think about how Donut would complain that the coffin is too plain and drab and really they should go and get some of his Chantilly lace, he has emergency supplies just for this purpose—

Wash has to breathe in, and focus on how his chest hurts, because he’s about to start either laughing or crying hysterically, and one is inappropriate and the other isn’t going to help. 

After the ceremony, after the family’s been presented with the flag and the coffin has been lowered into the ground and the appropriate speeches have been made, after the crowd has gathered in the field where the reception’s being held because there isn’t a large enough building still standing anymore, Wash seeks out the family. 

He’s rehearsing in his head the whole way— _I served with your son—I yelled at him once because he told our rescue ship to leave—for three months he was one of only three people I knew I could trust—I’m sorry, I messed up_ —no, not that _—I shot your son_ —no, definitely not that either. 

The family’s gathered up in one spot, and—because Wash is still a coward, sometimes—when he sees from the back as the tallest, a blonde–haired woman, breaks off and heads for the refreshments table, he goes to her first.

“Miss?” He sees her stiffen, and figure it’s just that she’s had too many people around her today, so he talks quickly. “I’m Agent Washington, I served with your brother, I just—”

She spins around, her face white, like she’s seen a ghost. “D-David?”

Wash feels like he’s been hit by a car without power armor, chest absolutely frozen. 

Mitch, it’s Mitch, older and tanner and taller and tireder, but it’s  _Mitch_ , his little sister.

“Mitch?” he whispers, brain as rattled as if he’d taken a concussion-level hit. “How—you—but—” and the realization hits, and whispers, “Oh, god,  _Ellie_.”

“Frank,” Mitch whispers, and then she throws herself at him and yells, “We thought you were  _dead!”_

He grabs onto her, holding her close and ignoring the commotion around him. 

It doesn’t take long for Jackie and Martha to tackle their way into the hug as well, and Wash lets the impacts take him down as they all yell at him. 

“David?” another voice says, and Wash extricates himself from the pile of bodies to look up at where his mother is standing, looking so small and fragile and hopeful he can’t breathe.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

* * *

A thought, without much order to speak of:

There’s a good chance the lie is that there were two truths.

* * *

They all leave the funeral, and there are explanations and shouting and more than a few tears and more than a lot of sim troopers demanding explanations and for some reason,  _Niner,_  who he’s now related to and who’s even more unhappy with his undeadness than his sisters. 

Wash is busy nursing the bruises on his shins from her wheelchair later when Martha comes out of the rooms they holed up in and settles down next to him, leaning into his shoulder. 

“Hey,” he says to her, easing the leg of his trousers back down. 

“It’s a bit much,” she says, eyes on some invisible horizon. “The noise and people.”

“Yeah,” he says, absently. He doesn’t really know how to explain that it’s not the noise so much as it is the memories, the feeling that any moment he’s going to wake up and it’s going to have been a dream. 

Or the feeling that the world made a mistake—he shouldn’t be there, he doesn’t belong there, Donut does, he deserves to be there, belongs there in a way Wash doesn’t. 

But he’s not there, and Wash is. 

They were already used to him being gone. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had become just a bit more final than it already was. But Donut deserved to come home to their—to  _his—_ family.

“It’s not your fault,” Martha says, out of nowhere.

“What?” She can’t actually be talking about what he thinks she’s talking about. 

“Frank, on the ship.” 

She can. 

Martha keeps talking. “You weren’t even on the ship when it happened. Quit thinking about what could have been before you drive yourself nuts. You’re here now. You’re alive.”

“Martha…”

“No. It’s not an either-or, Wash, I’m allowed to be sad that Donut’s gone and happy to see you again. Or, at least, that’s what Jackie would probably say. In fancy psych words. I’m sorry he’s gone. I’m not sorry you’re here. Neither is anyone else. Stop blaming yourself.”

Having said all she wants to say, apparently, Martha just stays there, leaning against his side and looking out at Chorus. 

“Did you have any idea?” she asks, quietly. 

Wash thinks about it. Thinks about details Donut would sometimes let drop about being the youngest of five, the way his face had looked under the scars, the mention of Iowa. All the little threads that almost made a full picture. 

The recoil of a gunshot, the sight of scarlet blood against pink armor, Simmons screaming at him. 

“No.” And so Wash tells his family the first of many lies. “Never.” 

It doesn’t come out easily. Martha doesn’t question it.

* * *

There are things he has to do, cleanup and paperwork and administration, trying to help Chorus get back on its feet. On orders from Doctor Grey, his sister Jackie,  _and_  his father, he has to go talk to a therapist regularly. 

It’s not comfortable. It maybe helps. 

He doesn’t tell his therapist, or anyone, about shooting Donut. The Reds, for once, leave the matter alone. 

It’s a long and quiet year, and when he’s put down his last signature, signed his armor over to a museum, and shaken hands with Kimball for the last time, he goes home. 

To be entirely accurate, he goes back to his apartment and makes himself a quiet cup of coffee, and figures he isn’t going to get off the couch for a week. Maybe two.

This plan is derailed after an hour by an insistent knock on the door. 

Wash opens the door to the sight of his sisters and siblings-in-law, armed with packing boxes. 

“Agent Washingtub! Freckles said we are going to go back to the farm and you are coming with us whether you want to or not.”

Mitch gives him a  _look_  he knows she got from their mother. Wash has enough of a self-preservation instinct to let them in without protest.

* * *

The farm is quiet, too. 

It’s quiet in a different way. The animals manage to make quite a bit of noise, but there are no space pirates, no blockade, no people in armor, and not even any sim-trooper-related chaos. Most of them are still on Chorus, anyways. Aside from Caboose, who’s easily distracted by the animals.

Wash spends a lot of time in the house or in the barn, since he’s banned from actual farming. He takes a lot of long walks, and when he comes back, tries not to notice how the house is a bright, vibrant, lightish red. 

The first time he saw that, when the car pulled up, he had to get out very quickly and go throw up. He’s pretty sure that they didn’t really believe his claim to carsickness, but they haven’t pressed him, either.

Mitch and Niner, much to Wash’s continued mild surprise, are indeed married, and with two kids. He talks to them, sometimes, helps out with their math homework and lets them convince him to take them out for ice cream. It’s nice, to see them excited, even if it’s hard to muster any emotion besides exhaustion most days. 

Life goes on, in that quiet, unchanging way farm life tends to go, and one day Wash wakes up and realizes it’s been a month since the last time he talked to someone who isn’t related to him. 

The secondary realization that that includes Caboose is what finally prompts him to send a message to Tucker and Carolina. 

They both reply back almost immediately, eager to know how he’s doing, and before long he’s caught up on the six months’ worth of shenanigans he either missed or wasn’t paying attention to. Some lunatic twist of fate and paperwork means that Grif and Simmons have become  _parents,_  Sarge and Dr. Grey eloped, Junior joined the Armonia youth basketball team, and Carolina thinks they might finally have a lead on Hargrove. 

He keeps talking to them, keeps getting up in the morning, and it takes a while, but he starts to tell stories. 

Harmless things, mostly to Shannon and Joel when they demand “uncle time,” and nothing inappropriate, but about the Reds and Blues and long days in a shipwrecked canyon (edited to sound far less dangerous and isolating than it really was) and beyond that, what he had been like at their age ( _also_  edited to sound far less dangerous and isolated than it really was). 

It doesn’t get better, but it does get easier, and when he drops a suggestion to Mitch over dishes one night about inviting the Reds and Blues to the farm, she agrees so fast he has a feeling he should be suspicious of something. 

* * *

Time keeps passing. Mitch buys a peacock that ends up getting adopted by the sheep. The barn cats have kittens. Wash keeps taking walks and stops automatically calculating the best places to mine the crop fields. 

On the day Tucker and Junior, the first visitors, are supposed to arrive, Wash borrows the flatbed truck and goes to pick them up. Jackie and Martha are at work, Joel and Shannon are at school, Mitch is meeting with the accountant, and Niner’s taken Caboose up in her crop duster. There’s no one in the house to hear the answering machine go off.

“ _Wash? Wash, pick up, dammit! It’s Carolina. I just found out—”_  the machine is old, and has a tendency to fuzz, but rarely do they sound so much like a choked breath. “ _I just found out where Hargrove’s been hiding—and_ what _he’s been hiding. I can’t explain on this line, but whatever you do,_ don’t _leave the house. Hole up, hide out, stay safe, I’ll come to you.”_  Rarely does the machine sound so much like a sob, either. _“And I’m sorry, Wash. I’m so sorry.”_

Ten minutes later, a call comes in from Mrs. Robins, who runs the local Farmer’s Market Association, well over six minutes in length. The elderly answering machine, pushed past its limits, dies with neither a bang nor a whimper but rather a brief crackle of fizzing static. 

* * *

Twenty miles away, in the next town over, a charming stranger with a frankly enormous duffle and a starburst scar on the side of his face rents a motorcycle. The dealer offers him his pick of the lot, and is somewhat surprised when he chooses the bright pink one in the corner. 

The man’s insistence on terming it “lightish red” is also puzzling, but his cash is good, so the dealer hands over the keys.

“So what’re you in town for?” she inquires, idly examining the intriguing lumps in the bag. 

“Oh, you know. Just visiting old friends. And I suppose I could get a car, but I just love the way these babies feel between my legs!”

* * *

Wash is halfway to the airport, forty miles away from home, and mentally planning the logistics of securing Junior and the suitcases in the bed of the truck when the wheel goes out.

It does so in a rather explosive fashion, which makes him curse Caboose as he forces the truck over to the side of the road. Niner’s brother—and that thought is never going to  _not_  be strange—must have had a hand in fixing the truck last time. And he’s pretty sure he left the spare tire behind to make more room, so that’s  _great_.  

Wash climbs out of the car to investigate, and what he finds isn’t good.

It hasn’t been so long since the war that he’s forgotten what a shot tire looks like. 

Another shot rings out, the bullet burying itself in the asphalt next to him, and Wash immediately rolls under the truck to buy himself time. 

He has a pistol next to the driver’s seat, because old habits die hard, but the immediate problem is now how to get it without getting shot. 

Wash starts trying to figure out what he could rip off the undercarriage and throw as a distraction when the decision is taken out of his hands by the car being lifted up and thrown away. 

Wash kicks off the shock to focus on  _moving,_  but an armored hand yanks around his ankle and cruelly twists until he hears the  _snap_  of breaking bone and fire runs through his leg. 

He grits his teeth and lands on the other leg, rolling over to face his attacker.

And that’s when his heart stops dead in his chest. 

It’s the Meta’s armor, which is a nightmare all in itself, but it’s in a color of a tie he’s only worn once, in the same color as the house, the same color that haunts his nightmares.

“Hello,  _Washington,_ ” and that’s wrong that’s wrong that’s Donut’s voice but it’s cruel and dark and  _wrong_ , what is this what’s  _happening—_  “Hear I’ve got something to pay you back for.”

And Wash can’t speak, can’t say anything, isn’t even sure that words and not a scream will come out if he opens his mouth. 

“What, don’t remember me?” And the voice is still so  _wrong._  “Well, I don’t exactly remember you, but I’ve got the scar and the video to prove I owe you a bullet.”

Wash swallows down the nausea that’s part shock, part memory, and croaks out, “Donut?”

“Oh, grow up, I didn’t hit you that hard, why are you babbling about breakfast food?”

“No.” Wash has to stop and push away the nausea, the horror  _no no no_  rising up in his gullet. “Name…Donut.”

“Who the hell would be named ‘Donut’?” His voice has shifted from angry to confused, and Wash starts to harbor some hope.

“You.” Wash doesn’t have to wrack his memory to come up with the full name. “Franklin Delano Donut.”

“I…I don’t…” the gun wavers, before fixing on Wash again. “Shut  _up_.”

Wash doesn’t. “Frank Donut, you were on Red Team, you’re my  _brother_. We thought you went down with the ship, we—I tried to look for you—”

“Shut  _up!”_  he roars, gun hand shaking badly. “You don’t—you can’t—” An incoherent growl comes out, and Wash tries so hard not to flinch. “You shot me,” Donut grits out, eventually. “Didn’t you.”

Wash breathes in. Breathes out. Doesn’t lie, not about this, for the first time in almost two years. “Yes.”

_And I’m sorry._

Neither of them say anything for a good minute, Donut pointing the pistol at Wash, Wash trying to focus on the pain in his ankle and forget the sight of scarlet blood against pink armor.

“Well,” Donut says eventually. “I don’t know if you’re telling the truth about us being re-related.” He twitches, and Wash can feel a spark of hope blooming—he knows better than anyone else about mental trauma, about memories not cooperating, and they come back, they have to, could this—

“But I’m pretty damn sure I owe you a penetration.” 

Wash can feel a hysterical laugh bubbling up—oh, lovely, more signs of shock—as the armored hand fades to white, along with the rest of the armor, and brings the gun down to aim at the center of his torso.

The exact same spot he sees in the worst of his nightmares, the spot where a red splash stands out against pink.

And for just one moment, right before the white-armored finger squeezes on the trigger, Wash can’t help but feel like the world has finally been brought back into balance.

**Author's Note:**

> ...sorry?  
>  Will be accepting angst war prompts on [my Tumblr](sroloc--elbisivni.tumblr.com) until Friday the 22!


End file.
